Windows Azure Platform brings new opportunities to Microsoft’s customers and partners

With the current state of the economy, companies from startups to ISV's to large organizations are looking for ways to reduce IT costs while bringing increased value to their business and to meet customer needs. The power and flexibility of the Windows Azure platform, Microsoft's cloud services platform, provides new opportunities for customers and partners to build and deploy new cloud based applications and services, while leveraging familiar tools and their current on-premises investments. Check out how customers and partners are using the Windows Azure platform today:

· TradeFacilitate built a solution, which helps importers and exporters in the European Union to exchange trade data using a paper-free online system that would permit the company to scale its applications to a significantly larger market without building out their infrastructure.

· Sitemasher deployed a Web development platform on the Windows Azure platform which enables service providers, Web professionals, and large organizations to create scalable, data-driven websites faster and at lower cost.

· City of Miami developed its 3-1-1 application using Windows Azure, taking advantage of near limitless storage and processing power to reduce IT costs and improve the services it offers citizens.

3M , using the compute power of the Windows Azure platform, developed an innovative service which allows designers to invoke complex algorithms to analyze the effectiveness of a design, like those used in advertising campaigns, based on how the human eye will respond (see Fig. 1).

Visit the Windows Azure Team blog for in-depth customer interviews and learn more at the Windows Azure platform website.